Abstract Expressionism. The dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s, characterized by a desire to convey powerful emotions through the sensuous qualities of paint, often on canvases of huge size. It was the first major development in American art to achieve international status and influence, and it is often reckoned the most significant art movement anywhere since the Second World War. The tremendous vitality it brought to the American art scene helped New York to replace Paris as the world capital of contemporary art, and to many Americans the heyday of the movement has already acquired a kind of legendary status as a golden age.

The phrase ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had originally been used in 1919 to describe certain paintings by Kandinsky, and it was used in the same way by Alfred H. Barr in 1929. In the context of modern American painting it was first used by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates (1897–1973) in 1946 and it had become part of the standard critical vocabulary by the early 1950s. The painters embraced by the term worked mainly in New York and there were various ties of friendship and loose groupings among them, but they shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style—an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt against tradition and a belief in spontaneous freedom of expression. The stylistic roots of Abstract Expressionism are complex, but despite its name it owed more to Surrealism—with its stress on automatism and intuition—than to Expressionism. A direct source of inspiration came from the European Surrealists who took refuge in the USA during the Second World War. The most important in this context was Matta, who promoted what Meyer Schapiro called the ‘idea of the canvas as a field of prodigious excitement, unloosed energies’. The war also brought Peggy Guggenheim back to America, and during its brief lifetime (1942–7) her Art of This Century gallery was the main showcase for Abstract Expressionism during its formative period.

David Anfam (Abstract Expressionism, 1990) writes that ‘Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Newman, Kline, Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb are by consensus prime members of the Abstract Expressionist canon.’ Among the secondary figures were William Baziotes, James Brooks, Lee Krasner, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodorus Stamos, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt were major figures, but not central to the movement. The work of these artists varied greatly and was sometimes neither abstract ( de Kooning) nor Expressionist ( Rothko). Attempts have been made to arrange them into stylistic groupings (see ABSTRACT IMAGISTS), but these are of doubtful use as they require so many qualifications. Their work varied from the explosive energy of Pollock's Action Painting to the serene contemplativeness of Rothko's Colour Field Painting. Even within these two polarities, however, there are certain qualities that are basic to most Abstract Expressionist painting: the preference for working on a huge scale; the emphasis placed on surface qualities so that the flatness of the canvas is stressed; the adoption of an all-over type of treatment, in which the whole area of the picture is regarded as equally important; the glorification of the act of painting itself; the conviction that abstract painting could convey significant meaning and should not be viewed in formalist terms alone; and a belief in the absolute individuality of the artist (for which reason most of the Abstract Expressionists disliked being labelled with an ‘ism’, preferring New York School as a group designation).

Almost without exception, the artists who created Abstract Expressionism were born between 1900 and 1915 most of them struggled during their early careers, which coincided with the Depression. Apart from Motherwell, the major figures began as representational painters, but generally moved towards abstraction in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The idea that these artists were beginning to create a new movement took shape in about 1943, and in 1945 Peggy Guggenheim mounted an exhibition called ‘A Problem for Critics’, almost as a challenge for someone to come up with a name for this movement. By 1948, when de Kooning had his first one-man show and Pollock first exhibited his drip paintings, it was approaching maturity. Initially the new way of painting was found perplexing or outlandish by many people, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success, helped by the support of the influential writers Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of artists carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. By 1960, also, reaction against the movement was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak. The immense significance of the movement in American culture was summed up by Maurice Tuchman when he wrote in 1971: ‘Virtually every important American artist to have emerged in the last fifteen years looks to … abstract expressionism as the point of departure, in the same way that most European artists of the 1920s and 1930s referred in their work to the inventions of cubism’ (The New York School, 1971, revised edn. of the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965). Since then Abstract Expressionism has continued to be influential, notably as one of the sources of Neo-Expressionism, and Robert Hughes considers that the success of the movement has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Action Painters

The abstract expressionists—also called "Action Painters" because their blobs, drips, whorls, and scribbles express the process of painting, which they considered the essence of art—were too abstract for untutored American art lovers in the 1950s. The major young American artists of the day were rede-fining art and revolutionizing the aesthetic principles on which it was based, the public be damned. Such painters as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko drew their inspiration from the Western European movements cubism and surrealism, from the publicly sponsored artists' programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, and from an unrelentingly threatening world political situation. The result was the first distinctly American art movement to have international influence.

Background

With the upheaval of Western Europe during the 1930s and the military threat of the Nazis beginning in 1939, an influential group of artists migrated to New York: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, and others. They were among the most respected modern artists in the world, and by the time of World War II their influence was concentrated in Manhattan. Meanwhile a generation of talented American artists had just emerged from the federally sponsored WPA, painting murals, contemplating the purposes of art in society, and benefiting from federal support providing the freedom to develop their talents and ideas.

American Roots

Beginning in the 1940s with the work of Hofmann and de Kooning, both immigrants who had settled permanently in New York City, a new attitude toward art began to evolve. Providing an American perspective on surrealism (art that attempts to portray experience beyond the realm of conscious perception), this new movement rejected all boundaries—those of form, shape, color, and medium. The artworks tended to be large, more suited to display in warehouses than on living-room walls or in traditional exhibit spaces. Materials were those at hand—house paint (more suitable for dripping than oils), tar, glue and whatever would stick to it, anything that would make a mark.

Theory

Frames were too restrictive and traditional shapes and forms too limiting for the abstract expressionists. The composition of these new artworks was intended to reflect spontaneous motion. Rather than recreating some perception on a canvas, the abstract expressionists recorded action: a splatter of paint, a series of random movements of some object attached to a marker, a mixture of colors producing the random arrangement of various colored objects. De Kooning painted a series of figures of women, departing progressively from realistic portrayals until he reached the point of complete obliteration of form. In fact, it seems that the primary point of representing a figure in his paintings of the 1950s was to distort it and to blur its similarity to a living figure.

Pollock

Pollock liked busy canvases. During the 1950s he developed the technique of drip painting, which was the flinging of paint of different colors onto a surface. The paint drippings recorded the motion of the artist's arm as he worked; the accumulation of sets of these drippings compressed time as the motion of one moment was layered over the motion of another. The drippings also had the effect of obliterating whatever was underneath them, and so the painterly actions of more-recent moments obscured those of earlier sessions, suggesting a philosophy akin to nihilism.

Obscurantists

Such artists as Franz Kline and Motherwell went a step further with their obscurantist tendencies: they obscured everything, so all that was left in their artworks was a nearly blank surface that, in the case of Kline, might have a single line across it or, in the case of Motherwell, might resemble an inkblot.

The Critics

Such aesthetic principles led to puzzling art that can be difficult to view. Moreover, the art enthusiast who turned to art critics for clarification found the explanations more baffling than the art itself. New Republic quoted an example of what it called "'advanced' criticism" from Art News. The subject of the comments is a white canvas by Kline with horizontal, broad, uneven black lines across it (a description that applies to several of his works): "In the past two years, there has been a change in [Kline's] style. Not a drastic one; white and black forms still soar, tumble and stand in as permanent a state of instability as ever. But … the white paint is whiter, bluer, more snow-like. The black pigments differentiate themselves as fat and lean pigments. He endows the absence of totality of refraction with the range of the spectrum. This is achieved by an emotional intensity that seems to burn all the color out of art."

The Audience

The casual museum-goer was confused to the point of annoyance by the art, by its explanation, and by the attention it received. By the mid 1950s works of what was referred to generically as modern art were being routinely sold for over ten thousand dollars. New Republic summarized the opinion of a generation of art lovers lagging slightly behind the Avantgarde in its observation that "uninhibited daubing has recognized educational value for children in early grades and as a therapeutic device in certain instances of adult mental disorder…, We part company [with advocates of modern art] … when the talk turns to 'masterpieces' and when abstract expressionism is held aloft as the apogee of contemporary creativeness."

Sources:

Robert Carleton Hobbs and Gail Levin, Abstract Expressionism; The Formative Years (New York: Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art / New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978);

Robert Myron and Abner Sundell, Modern Art in America (New York: Crowell-Collier / London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971);

"Mystique of the Drip," New Republic, 140 (5 June 1959): 6-7;

Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975).

Abstract Expressionism, a dominant style of art in America from the end of World War II to the early 1960s.Abstract Expressionism included the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–); the improvisatory nonobjective metal‐welded sculpture of Herbert Ferber (1906–1991), David Smith (1906–1965), and Seymour Lipton (1903–1986); and the tonal studies of Mark Rothko (1903–1970). Sometimes called “The New York School” because of the many Abstract Expressionist artists centered there from the late 1940s through the 1950s, the style simultaneously erupted in the San Francisco Bay area in the paintings and sculptures of Clyfford Still (1904–1980), Richard Diebenkorn (1922–), and Manuel Neri (1930–), and was subsequently embraced by artists across America. Concurrent with U.S. global ascendancy in politics and industrial production, Abstract Expressionism was critically acclaimed as a uniquely American form of modern art, and New York City declared the capital of contemporary art.

In 1945, art critic Robert Coates of the New Yorker magazine first reported that a style of abstract art, largely devoid of representational subject matter and painted in a gestural and expressionist manner, was gaining ascendancy in America. Abstract Expressionists rejected the narrative and representational styles, widespread public appeal, and political views of 1930s New Deal Era and social realist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) and Ben Shahn (1898–1969), as well as the hard‐edged abstract art of interwar modernists like Stuart Davis (1894–1964). Instead, they pioneered improvisational modes of art focused on the physicality of media and personal expression. Pollock's much–publicized “drip paintings” (1947–1950), dubbed “action painting” by critic Harold Rosenberg, were made by placing unprimed canvases on the floor and pouring and dripping paints in precise patterns onto their surfaces. David Smith similarly experimented with materials, techniques, and composition in his abstract metal sculptures of the 1950s. Abstract Expressionist art embodies profound disaffection with the postwar political climate of consensus, Cold War, and nuclear menace, as well as artistic yearning for self‐determination. Some Abstract Expressionist artists retained identifiable subjects as in de Kooning's Woman I, 1950–1952, for example, while others, including Barnett Newman (1905–1970), pursued flatter, nongestural styles.

Despite their differing stylistic preferences, Abstract Expressionist artists were generally allied in aesthetic and technical experimentation, a focus on the creative process, the use of art as a means of self‐realization, the separation of art and popular culture, and the rejection of art for public or social purposes.

The stylistic origins of Abstract Expressionism can be found in Surrealist art (many European artists, such as Hans Hoffman, André Masson, and Max Ernst, as well as the Chilean painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, found refuge in the United States during World War II); the indigenous arts of North America (represented in several exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and 1940s); and renewed interest in nineteenth‐century American transcendentalist landscape painting. The movement's cultural and intellectual underpinnings include the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung; existential philosophy ( Jean‐Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism was translated into English in 1948); and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a study of myth and the importance of modern mythmakers. The context of Abstract Expressionism also includes such diverse forms of postwar cultural experimentation as the Beat movement in literature; the jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; avant‐garde dance and composition; the rock‐and‐roll movement in popular music; and the rebellious youth‐culture films of James Dean and Marlon Brando.

Critics such as Clement Greenberg championed Abstract Expressionism as evidence of American cultural superiority and heroic individualism. Later cultural historians explored the ways it illuminated the interconnections of Cold War art and politics. Although succeeded by other art styles such as Pop and Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism remained a major point of departure for artistic and critical explorations, from the process art of Eva Hesse (1936–1970) to the 1980s movement of Neo‐Expressionism.
See also Fifties, The; Painting: To 1945; Painting: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Dore Ashton , The New York School, A Cultural Reckoning, 1972.
Michael Auping, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, 1987.
Erika Doss , Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, 1991.
Stephen Polcari , Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, 1991.
Michael Leja , Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, 1993.
Ann Eden Gibson , Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 1997.

Erika Doss

Abstract Expressionism. The dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and 1950s, characterized by a desire to convey powerful emotions through the sensuous qualities of paint, often on canvases of huge size. It was the first major development in American art to achieve international status and influence, and it is often reckoned the most significant art movement anywhere since the Second World War. The energy and excitement it brought to the American art scene helped New York to replace Paris as the world capital of contemporary art, and to many Americans the heyday of the movement has already acquired a kind of legendary status as a golden age.

The phrase ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had originally been used in 1919 to describe certain paintings by Kandinsky, but in the context of modern American painting it was first used by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates (1897–1973) in 1945; by the end of the decade it had become part of the standard critical vocabulary. The painters embraced by the term worked mainly in New York and there were various ties of friendship and loose groupings among them, but they shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style—an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt against tradition and a desire for spontaneous freedom of expression. The stylistic roots of Abstract Expressionism are complex, but despite its name it owed more to Surrealism—with its stress on automatism and intuition—than to Expressionism. A direct source of inspiration came from the European Surrealists who took refuge in the USA during the Second World War, most notably Matta, who promoted what the American art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–96) called the ‘idea of the canvas as a field of prodigious excitement, unleashed energies’. The war also brought Peggy Guggenheim back to America, and during its brief lifetime (1942–7) her Art of This Century gallery was the main showcase for Abstract Expressionism during its formative period.

The most famous Abstract Expressionist is Jackson Pollock, whose explosive Action Painting best sums up the movement, but the work of other leading exponents was sometimes neither abstract (the leering Women of de Kooning) nor expressionist (the serene visions of Rothko). Even allowing for these wide differences, however, there are certain qualities that are basic to most Abstract Expressionist painting: the preference for working on a huge scale; the emphasis placed on surface qualities, so that the flatness of the canvas is stressed; the adoption of an all-over type of treatment, in which the whole area of the picture is regarded as equally important; the glorification of the act of painting itself; the conviction that abstract painting could convey significant meaning and should not be viewed in formalist terms alone; and a belief in the absolute individuality of the artist (for which reason most of the Abstract Expressionists disliked being labelled with an ‘ism’, preferring New York School as a group designation).

Alongside de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko, the painters who are considered central to Abstract Expressionism include Gorky, Gottlieb, Guston, Kline, Motherwell, Newman, and Still. Most of them struggled for recognition early in their careers, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of painters carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by the movement, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw (1913– ), Seymour Lipton (1903–86), and Theodore Roszak (1907–81). By 1960, also, reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Indeed, much of the subsequent history of American art can be written in terms of developments from or responses to the movement, and Robert Hughes considers that its success has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.

Abstract Expressionism The dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and 1950s, characterized by a desire to convey powerful emotions through the sensuous qualities of paint, often on canvases of huge size. It was the first major development in American art to achieve international status and influence, and it is often reckoned the most significant art movement anywhere since the Second World War. The energy and excitement it brought to the American art scene helped New York to replace Paris as the world capital of contemporary art, and to many Americans the heyday of the movement has already acquired a kind of legendary status as a golden age.

The phrase ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had originally been used in 1919 to describe certain paintings by Kandinsky, but in the context of modern American painting it was first used by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates in 1945; by the end of the decade it had become part of the standard critical vocabulary. The painters embraced by the term worked mainly in New York and there were various ties of friendship and loose groupings among them, but they shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style—an outlook characterized by a spirit of revolt against tradition and a desire for spontaneous freedom of expression. The stylistic roots of Abstract Expressionism are complex, but despite its name it owed more to Surrealism—with its stress on automatism and intuition—than to Expressionism; a direct source of inspiration came from the European Surrealists who took refuge in the USA during the Second World War. The most famous Abstract Expressionist is Jackson Pollock, whose explosive Action Painting best sums up the movement, but the work of other leading exponents was sometimes neither abstract (the leering Women of de Kooning) nor expressionist (the serene visions of Rothko). Even allowing for these wide differences, however, there are certain qualities that are basic to most Abstract Expressionist painting: the preference for working on a huge scale; the emphasis placed on surface qualities, so that the flatness of the canvas is stressed; the adoption of an all-over type of treatment, in which the whole area of the picture is regarded as equally important; the glorification of the act of painting itself; the conviction that abstract painting could convey significant meaning and should not be viewed in formalist terms alone; and a belief in the absolute individuality of the artist (for which reason most of the Abstract Expressionists disliked being labelled with an ‘ism’, preferring New York School as a group designation).

Alongside de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko, the painters who are considered central to Abstract Expressionism include Gorky, Gottlieb, Guston, Kline, Motherwell, Newman, and Still. Most of them struggled for recognition early in their careers, but during the 1950s the movement became an enormous critical and financial success. It had passed its peak by 1960, but several of the major figures continued productively after this and a younger generation of painters carried on the Abstract Expressionist torch. Sculptors as well as painters were influenced by the movement, the leading figures including Ibram Lassaw (1913– ), Seymour Lipton (1903–86), and Theodore Roszak (1907–81). By 1960, also, reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism was under way, in the shape principally of Pop art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Indeed, much of the subsequent history of American art can be written in terms of developments from or responses to the movement, and Robert Hughes considers that its success has ‘encouraged a phony grandiloquence, a confusion of pretentious size with scale, that has plagued American painting ever since’.

abstract expressionism movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school. It was the first important school in American painting to declare its independence from European styles and to influence the development of art abroad. Arshile Gorky first gave impetus to the movement. His paintings, derived at first from the art of Picasso , Miró , and surrealism , became more personally expressive.

Jackson Pollock 's turbulent yet elegant abstract paintings, which were created by spattering paint on huge canvases placed on the floor, brought abstract expressionism before a hostile public. Willem de Kooning 's first one-man show in 1948 established him as a highly influential artist. His intensely complicated abstract paintings of the 1940s were followed by images of Woman, grotesque versions of buxom womanhood, which were virtually unparalleled in the sustained savagery of their execution. Painters such as Philip Guston and Franz Kline turned to the abstract late in the 1940s and soon developed strikingly original styles—the former, lyrical and evocative, the latter, forceful and boldly dramatic. Other important artists involved with the movement included Hans Hofmann , Robert Motherwell , and Mark Rothko ; among other major abstract expressionists were such painters as Clyfford Still , Theodoros Stamos , Adolph Gottlieb , Helen Frankenthaler , Lee Krasner , and Esteban Vicente.

Abstract expressionism presented a broad range of stylistic diversity within its largely, though not exclusively, nonrepresentational framework. For example, the expressive violence and activity in paintings by de Kooning or Pollock marked the opposite end of the pole from the simple, quiescent images of Mark Rothko. Basic to most abstract expressionist painting were the attention paid to surface qualities, i.e., qualities of brushstroke and texture; the use of huge canvases; the adoption of an approach to space in which all parts of the canvas played an equally vital role in the total work; the harnessing of accidents that occurred during the process of painting; the glorification of the act of painting itself as a means of visual communication; and the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas. The movement had an inestimable influence on the many varieties of work that followed it, especially in the way its proponents used color and materials. Its essential energy transmitted an enduring excitement to the American art scene.

Bibliography: See M. Seuphor, Abstract Painting: Fifty Years of Accomplishment from Kandinsky to the Present (1962, repr. 1964); I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970); M. Tuchman, ed., The New York School: Abstract Expressionism in the 40s and 50s (rev. ed. 1970); S. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983); W. C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (1983); F. Frascina, ed., Pollock and After (1985); D. Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (1990); S. Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (1991); A. E. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997); D. Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique (1999).

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, often known as "the New York School" or "American action painting,"

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

describes the works of a loose community of painters in New York from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Initially influenced by surrealism and cubism, abstract expressionists rejected the social realism, regionalism, and geometric abstraction so popular with American painters of the 1930s. Instead, they turned first to mythology and then to their own experiences and insights as subject matter for their bold, at times dizzying, abstract compositions.

The term "abstract expressionism" dates from 1946, when Robert Coates of the New Yorker first used it to describe the works of several American abstractionists. Because works of abstract expressionism can diverge wildly in terms of structure and technique, art historian Irving Sandler divides abstract expressionists into two categories: gesture painters and color-field painters. Jackson Pollock remains the preeminent gesture painter; in such paintings as Cathedral (1947) and Autumn Rhythm (1950), Pollock eschewed recognizable symbols entirely, composing delicate webs of interpenetrating shapes. Color-field painters, on the other hand, suppressed all references to the past by painting unified fields of varying color. Un-like their counterparts, who often valued the act of painting as much as the finished product, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and other color-field painters strove to reproduce the metaphysical experience of the sublime.

Because each artist emphasized his or her own absolute individuality, abstract expressionists continually rejected the notion that they had coalesced into a school. Nevertheless, by 1943, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and other future abstract expressionists were becoming increasingly familiar with each other's work. From 1943 to 1945, Peggy Guggenheim exhibited many early works of abstract expressionism in her Art of This Century Gallery. During the late 1940s, many abstract expressionists also congregated in the Subjects of the Artist School, the Cedar Tavern, and the infamous Eighth Street Club to socialize and engage in intellectual debate. Critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg emerged as abstract expressionism's most articulate champions.

Set against a backdrop of Cold War conformity, abstract expressionists often saw their work as the ultimate statement of romantic individuality and artistic freedom. By the early 1950s, however, abstract expressionism was losing much of its initial appeal. Although some abstract expressionists continued to experiment with pure abstraction, others began to reintroduce recognizable subject matter into their canvases. By mid-decade, abstract expressionism was finding a frequent home in major museums and private collections. The United States Information Agency (USIA) even organized exhibitions of abstract expressionism in response to accusations of American "philistinism."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gibson, Ann Eden. Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. New York: Praeger, 1970.

John M.Kinder

See alsoCubism .

abstract expressionism Mainly US art movement in which the creative process itself is examined and explored. It is neither wholly abstract nor wholly expressionist. The term originally applied to paintings created (1945–55) by about 15 artists from the New York School. Although very different in temperament and style, these individuals shared a fascination with surrealism and ‘psychic automatism’ as well as other progressive European styles. Towards the early 1950s, two distinct groups emerged with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock heading the most aggressive trend (loosely known as action painting), which involved dripping or throwing paint on the canvas. Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko were more contemplative.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/movements_works_Abstract_Expressionism_0.html